Taylor's premise was that archaeologists can and should go beyond their
preoccupation with specific historic description (Taylor's historiography,
Deetz's archaeography) and use archaeological data to conduct studies of
cultural dynamics at the general, abstract level (Taylor's ethnology,
Deetz's archaeology).  Taylor proposed the "conjunctive approach" as a means
of attaining that objective.

Advocates of the New Archaeology (of whom Lewis Binford was the undisputed
bellwether) started with the same premise as Taylor's, but proposed a
different means of attaining the end objective (processual archaeology):
namely, the analysis and interpretation of archaeological data by the
application, in a "scientific" way, of various methods and theories borrowed
from physics, biology, geography, philosophy, mathematics, and other
disciplines.  As a result, archaeological literature became fraught with
paradigms, general systems theory, the hypthetico/deductive method,
settlement pattern models, probability sampling formulas, correlation
coefficients, game theory, evolutionary models, chaos theory, and more.

Taylor, the Roger Daingerfield of American archaeology, felt that his
contributions to the underpinnings of the New Archaeology had not been
properly credited.  So in 1969 he published a paper in SCIENCE in which he
cited passages from his STUDY OF ARCHAEOLOGY that clearly anticipated
specific tenets of the New Archaeology movement.

Comparison of Taylor's book and paper in SCIENCE with published works of
Binford and other proponents of the New Archaeology demonstrate that Taylor
did, indeed, set the stage for the New Archaeology movement by posing the
question: Is archaeology really anthropology, and if so, how can
archaeologists use their data to study cultural dynamics in a general way at
an abstract level?

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